The present disclosure relates generally to computer systems and software, and more particularly, to techniques for facilitating and automating the provision of services in a distributed computing environment. A distributed computing environment such as a cloud computing environment is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, PODs, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, services, etc.) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of the service. The provider may provide a variety of services via the distributed computing environment. These services may include one or more services provided under Software as a Service (SaaS) category, Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category, or other categories of services including hybrid services.
A user (e.g., a customer or client), via an order or service subscription, may order one or more of the services provided by the distributed computing environment. The distributed computing environment then performs processing (e.g., provisioning, managing, and tracking) to provide the services requested within the user's subscription order. Typically, when the provider (e.g., a cloud service provider) receives an order or service subscription subscribing to the one or more services, the distributed computing environment provisions or allocates the configurable computing resources for the one or more services to the requesting user. However, the requesting user does not have control over how the configurable computing resources are provisioned or allocated nor does the distributed computing environment manage the configurable computing resources to anticipate demand from the requesting user for the configurable computing resources. These challenges may present automation, performance, and usability issues, which cannot be readily addressed by existing distributed computing environments that provision or allocate configurable computing resources.